![]() Pesce was one of the co-developers of “ I Can Stalk U,” a project designed to alert people about the potential dangers of geotagging. The big issue here is being aware of what exactly you are posting.” I think the majority of people have no idea that the location of their images is being tagged. “However, there are a few security issues, mostly related in how the stored location information is used. ![]() “The information is great for recording the location in which the photo was taken, which can then be used to sort photographs later – that’s how I and most people use it and that’s what it was originally designed for,” says Larry Pesce, senior security consultant with NWN Corporation in Waltham, Massachusetts. Cyber criminals can quickly and easily find out when a person’s home is empty because the homeowner might post geotagged and time-stamped info both about their home address and their vacation residence, for example. It seems implausible, but posting photos and other media tagged with exact geolocation on the Internet allows random people with the right tracking software and wrong motives to find an individual’s location and correlate it with other information. Geotagging has an accuracy of within 15 feet.īut, while you are letting friends and families know where you are with your posts, you are also at risk from burglars and stalkers. Many smartphones and digital cameras come with built-in GPS with a geotagging feature that embeds at least the latitude and longitude coordinates of your location. Would you like to tag a safety threat to your photo? Canon’s PowerShot SX280 HS is one such digital camera with built-in GPS you can use to geotag your photos. Before you succumb to fear and turn off the geotagging feature on your devices and apps, however, let’s look at how the process works, the security issues involved, and how you can easily keep yourself from harm. While seemingly harmless, with every photo they post, there are possible dangers that users may not be aware of when they expose themselves, friends, and family members to. Today, everyone who uses social media like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram is most likely utilizing this technology in some form – whether they realize it or not. Photographers can benefit from photos encoded with GPS data: Using the data, photos can be easily cataloged, organized, and classified, especially into areas of special interest. Geo-coordinates are often also reported to apps running on a cell phone, such as Angry Birds.”īesides location, that metadata (found in a file’s EXIF data) might also include elevation, bearing, distance, and even the name of a place like restaurants and shops. “In other words, earth coordinates (often accurate to +/-1m) as reported by GPS modules built into cell phones and cameras (or guessed using Wi-Fi and cell-tower triangulation) are embedded in machine-readable format (i.e., not necessarily obvious to humans) as part of a JPEG file, a Twitter post, or Facebook Places. ![]() “Geotagging is adding geo-location metadata to an image or social media post,” says Gerald Friedland, director of Audio and Multimedia Research at the International Computer Science Institute, a private, non-profit research laboratory affiliated with the University of California, Berkeley.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |